Like Amazon, Google will offer users a digital locker which can store your songs in the cloud. They can then be streamed to an Android device or via your Web browser – which you can already do with Google Docs, albeit one song at a time (there’s no way to queue up multiple tracks or build playlists). Android streaming has already been heavily tested, thanks to a leaked Android Music app which started making the rounds late in 2010. Google also follows in Amazon’s footsteps as far as label support goes – it’s just launching, without waiting for labels to give the thumbs up.

So what will Google Music offer that makes it more attractive than Amazon? How about roughly ten times the free storage? At 50GB, a free Google locker could accommodate about 20,000 tracks to Amazon’s 2,000 (though paid upgrades are available).

Amazon, however, does offer users the option of purchasing music – and those songs are also made available via its Cloud Player. Google had planned on offering a more full-featured service, but the company’s Jamie Rosenberg stats that it met with resistance from a few major labels which “were less focused on [Google’s] innovative vision…and more interested in in an unreasonable and unsustainable set of business terms.”

It’s believed that beta invites for Google Music will be handed out tomorrow, and Google hopes to make the service available to all U.S. users within a few weeks.

Reader Comments

http://www.digitalundivide.com applemoney

This move by Google makes the music cloud business more interesting. Amazon already took the lead but Google may become the undisputed leader because its service is totally free. I don’t know why Google selected the name Music Beta but I hope the service doesn’t become a service in eternal beta testing like Microsoft Pubcenter.